


a spark, a human soul

by fallencrest



Category: Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-23
Updated: 2012-03-23
Packaged: 2017-11-02 10:36:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 470
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/368040
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fallencrest/pseuds/fallencrest
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cinna's thoughts on Katniss - she is unlike anyone he's ever dressed before, because she is entirely herself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a spark, a human soul

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by the film (which made me ship these two a little - though this ended up as gen!fic).
> 
> Written in 20 minutes.

Katniss Everdeen is not like anyone else who Cinna has ever dressed. His clients come to him expecting him to change them, to make them into a piece of pageantry. Some of them are beautiful and some of them are grotesques but none of them want to be themselves. But then there’s Katniss. Katniss with her hair braided by her mother, crying out for her sister, saving her life. Katniss who doesn’t even try to be defiant as she states her name for the crowd, for the screens all across Panem. She’s wearing her best dress, Cinna thinks, her finest, and yet it is as austere as she is - and it lacks her passion. 

When he had asked to be assigned District 12, he had not expected Katniss Everdeen. He had expected some scared child, some shaking leaf of a thing, and - whilst Katniss is both of those things - she’s also something more. 

If he’s honest, he had never expected his tribute to live. He’d thought he would dress some sweet coalminer’s daughter and then watch her die. 

The moment he sees her, he is sure Katniss will live - could live, has a chance - and he wants to dismiss it but there it is, the spark, and he wants to save her so much more than he ever wanted to save that anonymous girl he’d envisioned. He wonders if any other individual girl would have made him feel this way and he can’t tell, looking out at the sea of faces in her district, all the girls whose chance of survival skyrocketed the moment Primrose Everdeen’s name was pulled from the reaping bowl. He cannot tell, all he can tell is that he is going to have to save Katniss, any way he can. 

By the time he meets her, she’s been cleaned, hosed down. They would have done more to her, he’s sure, if he’d let them. They’d spoken of all the procedures they could do to make her more beautiful and he’d refused every one because he knew that each would make her a little less herself. He does not know her, does not know the girl who he meets in a flimsy, blue paper gown under florescent light, and yet he feels he has seen more of Katniss Everdeen’s soul than he has seen of anyone’s he’s met in the Capitol. Katniss Everdeen is real and she is alive and all he wants, desperately, is to allow Katniss Everdeen to live for as long as possible. 

He’d expected to look into the eyes of his tribute and see a dead girl but he looks into Katniss Evedeen’s eyes and he sees fire. He promises himself that he will keep that flame alight and he will make sure that he is not the only one to see it.


End file.
